Research Overview

The research in our lab is based on optical microresonators. These chip-based, micro/millimeter scale photonic devices are able to confine light for up to several hundreds of nanoseconds, effectively compressing several tens of meters of the light beam into microscale structures. This results in high circulating optical power inside the resonator, which makes the optical microresonator a popular platform for studying new physics and photonics applications.

Three silica microresonators on a silicon chip. 

In our group, we are particularly interested in studying microresonator-based optical frequency combs (microcombs). Microcombs use Kerr nonlinearity to convert a single wavelength, continuous wave pump laser into hundreds of laser lines with equally spaced frequencies (called frequency comb).  Microcombs leverage integrated photonics to miniaturize the Nobel prize-winning comb technology, which could revolutionize the instrumentation in spectroscopy, metrology, navigation, and astronomy.